In Our Time - Friendship

Episode Date: March 2, 2006

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the concept of friendship. In Greek and Roman times, friendship was thought of as being an essential constituent of both a good society and a good life; a good society because it lay at the heart of participative civic democracy; a good life because it nurtured wisdom and happiness. It is this period which gives us the texts on friendship which, to this day, are arguably the most important of their kind. Amongst their authors is Aristotle, who engaged in one of the great philosophical discussions on the subject. For Aristotle, friendship could fall into three categories: it could be based on utility, pleasure or goodness. In its latter state, Aristotle described it as being 'a single soul dwelling in two bodies'. So how did the Ancients establish the parameters of the true nature of friendship in the literature and philosophy that followed? How have different forms of friendship helped or hindered creativity and intellectual pursuit? What has been the apparent relationship between friendship and power? And what of the darker aspects of friendship - jealousy, envy and exploitation? With Angie Hobbs, Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Warwick; Mark Vernon, Visiting Lecturer in Philosophy at Syracuse University and London Metropolitan University; John Mullan, Professor of English at University College London.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. In Greek and Roman times, friendship was thought of as being an essential constituent of both a good society and a good life.

A good society, because it lay at the heart of participative civic democracy, a good life because it nurtured wisdom and happiness. It's this period which gives us the text of friendship which to this day are arguably the most important of their kind. Amongst their authors is Aristotle, who engaged in one of the great philosophical discussions on the subject. For Aristotle, friendship could fall into three categories. It could be based on utility, pleasure or goodness.

In its latter state, Aristotle described it as being a single soul dwelling in two bodies. So how did the ancients establish the parameters of the true nature? of friendship in our literature and philosophy that followed. How have different forms of friendship helped or hindered creativity and intellectual pursuit? What's been the apparent relationship between friendship and power, and what of the darker aspects of friendship, jealousy, envy and exploitation? With me to discuss friendship are Angie Hobbes,

lecturer in philosophy at the University of Warwick, Mark Vernon, the visiting lecture in philosophy at Syracuse University, and John Mullen, Professor of English at UCL. Angie Hobbs, can you tell us the role friendship played in the ancient world? Well, if we start with Greece, I think there are a number of features of the way Greek society was structured and the way it thought about itself, which made it particularly fertile ground for friendship, particularly if he were male. The basic political unit was the Polis, the city-state, and that was a relatively small, geographically condensed area in which adult males would regularly meet each other as they went about their daily business in the marketplace and elsewhere. And in Athens, you've got the extra feature that it was a participatory democracy, if you were a properted adult male. So there's another reason to keep meeting each other.

And there were also certain quasi-institutions in Athens, such as the symposium or drinking party, and the Hittarii or comradeships, which again brought people together on a regular basis. And of course, we're dealing with the world with almost no welfare system. So you really needed your friendships to help you out. in times of poverty or if your wife dialed in childbirth or so on. Now, in terms of its belief system, nearly every Greek thinker or writer that we know about takes it for granted that humans are naturally social animals and will naturally come together to form friendships.

And in terms of their philosophers, again, almost every philosopher holds that the basic ethical starting points are how we should live and what sort of person we should be. Now, if those are your ethical starting points, you've immediately got a lot of space for friendship because friendship can both form a constituent of the good flourishing life, and it can also provide both the means for acquiring virtue

and a means for displaying virtue. You talk to philosophers. Let's start with Plato. What did he bring to this discussion? Well, Plato writes an extremely interesting and not-so-well-known dialogue called the Lysis, which offers us, friendship, both in theory and in practice. Socrates and his young interlocutors, on the one hand, they discuss the pros and cons of different accounts of friendship and how friendship love relates

to other forms of love, such as erotic love and family feeling. But also, they offer us different kinds of friendship in action. And we see how friendship can be used to further self-knowledge and further philosophy itself. How do we see that? So sorry? How do we see that, sorry? Well, in the friendships that Socrates forms with these young teenage males, in the friendships that they begin to form amongst themselves,

they use these friendships to better their philosophical discussions with each other. And so we see how friendship can be used to achieve an aim higher than itself. Does he come to any essential resolution of the idea of friendship, or is the word too elasticated? Well, in terms of the theory that the dialogue offers, it gives us three main models for analysis. So very briefly, they start by looking at the idea of whether friendship is a matter of like being attracted to like, which was a favourite notion of the pre-Socratic philosopher in pedicles. But they dismiss this because they say, well, amongst like people, there's just too much scope for rivalry.

So they then turn to the other end of the spectrum and they look at the Heraclitean notion of whether opposites attract. But the trouble with this is that you would then have to say that the good is attracted to the bad and the just to the unjust. And again, they think that that would be impossible. Now, the model that they give most mileage to is the notion that friendship is a case of the good being attracted to the good, not because of their similarity, but simply because they are appreciating and enjoying the other's goodness. Now, there's still a difficulty here because they hold that the good is self-sufficient. And so what need would the good person have of friends? But I think that Plato gives us some clues that that difficulty can be resolved

if we think more carefully about what the self-sufficient life involves. But that does become a running dualism throughout the ideas of friendship. If you're self-sufficient, you need friends and so on. But can we now go, Mark Vernon, to Aristotle and Nicomachean ethics. He followed Plato, as we know, as a pupil of Plato's. how did he develop these ideas? What did he add to them? Aristotle picks up directly from Plato

and the conundrums that Plato's thrown up and what he says is that we might be able to make some progress if we do two things. First of all, if we start with a notional definition of friendship and the definition that he comes up with is that friends are people who share mutual goodwill. The friends will well for each other and they know about it too.

That's an important thing. But secondly, he asks, what is it that causes friendship to start with? And this is where Aristotle's three models of friendship come up. He says that there are, first of all, friends form because of what people do together, so-called utility friendship. And utility friendship is a good example might be when people work together. When they work together, they form a friendship as a result of that. The second sort are friendships of pleasure, and these form because people do something together,

they share something that they enjoy. It might be, well, it wouldn't have been in ancient Greece, but it might have been in the football or shopping. The one actually that Aristotle talks a little bit about is sexual friendship. Now, the trouble with these first two sorts of friendship is that they rely on something which is apart from the friends themselves, the thing that they do together, the thing they enjoy together. So if the thing that they do or enjoy together ceases, then the friendship tends to dissolve two. This leads Aristotle to his third sort of friendship. and the good thing about the third sort of friendship is that it's based on the fact that you love someone

for who they are in themselves and because the most lovable things in life are good things and because good things in virtue ethics of the ancients lasts therefore that's the best sort of friendship that's going to last and Aristotle calls it friendship of excellence or virtue friendship or character friendship and these ideas are well they still obtain in many ways

but they obtained for two or three hundred years until we come to the Roman thinkers Cicero and Seneca, who modified them in different ways. I'm asking a lot of you, but could you give us some summary of the way they modified them there? Yeah, Cicero certainly picks up on Aristotle and just sort of turns them to the world of the late Republic, where he sees where friendships are under great deal of stress. In fact, he writes his dialogue on friendship in the year that he's had a huge scrap with Mark Antony, and you can see that coming through.

But two or three things from Aristotle that Cicero picks up on. One of the most important formulas that Aristotle comes up with is the idea that the friend is another self. What he means by this is at a kind of pedestrian level that you see yourself in your friend. And Cicero says, yep, the key to friendship is that you have complete parity of interests and concerns in the friend. That's what makes for the best sort of friend. Aristotle also suggests that the another self means that you kind of meld with your friend. We might say, you know, when you bask in someone's reflected glory, that's almost because what's happened to your friend has happened to you too,

and they've become another self at a kind of ontological level. And Cicero, too, picks up on this. He talks about it actually in relation to death and dying, and he says that when the friend dies, he still lives because he lives in your heart, a very profound sense of connectedness. But Aristotle still can't quite resolve Plato's old problem of how the self-sufficient person would need friends. He, at the end of his ethics,

he concludes that happiness is probably going to be best made by being self-sufficient because you don't rely on other people for your happiness. And Cicero too recognises that, but he makes a subtle observation. He says that it seems that the best sort of people to form friends are actually those who are kind of self-sufficient to start with. So he says that it's not through need at all that the best sorts of friendship form,

purely few nature, a stoic idea. And he says, and they're good people. We'll have to skip Seneca for the moment because I want to go, or skip him for this programme. John Mullen, we've talked about the philosophers, but friendship also is playing a great part in the ancient world

in its literature. So could you first of all tell us how it figures in Homer Zilliad? Right. Well, I mean, it's there in Homer's Ilya, in a way, therefore, right at the start of Western literature, because the story of a friendship, but rather disturbing and violent story of a friendship, is in some ways the central thread of the Iliad. The Iliad begins with Achilles, the Greeks' greatest warrior,

and Agamemnon their general, having fallen out Achilles sulking in his tent, a quarrel over a slave girl. And much of the Iliad is given over to the question of how Achilles is going to be persuaded back into action. And Achilles' strongest bond is with his friend Patroclus. And Petroclos is deputed to try and persuade Achilles to join the battle, which is going very badly for the Greeks, and he doesn't succeed. And then he's dressed up in Achilles' armour,

in the hope that even the appearance that this Achilles-like person will strike fear into the Trojans. And in Achilles' armour, Petroclos is killed. And this finally goads, drives Achilles in fury into joining the battle. Pope said about the Iliad, its opponent, founded upon anger and its effects. And Achilles is made furiously angry and anguished by Petrochus's death. And he joins the battle, he kills Hector and the whole fortunes of war shift. And this friendship is so important to Achilles.

He says all sorts of terrible things, actually. He would rather, his father died. He was rather his only son died. He says in one extraordinary speech that what he'd really like is for all the Greeks and all the Trojans to perish. And he and Petroclos alone to have, as it were, triumphed over Troy. And at the end and the funeral for Petroclos, he does a terrible thing. He sacrifices 12 Trojan youths on Petroclos' funeral pyre. And so you have this sense at once of friendship.

in that martial epic being the most fundamental and emotionally fundamental value and yet also disturbingly set against in a way comradeship. Achilles won't do things for his comrades. He'll only do things for his friend. And also set in violence. In violence actually seems to activate friendship. Yes, it's a kind of, I mean, in a sense,

I think that's not so unfamiliar to us. I mean, we have the debased descendant of it in the kind of the buddy movie, that the relation, as it were, when the chips are down, is when you experience friendship most intensely, and that's a male thing. You get it in, again, in Virgil's an ear, the other great martial epic of Western civilization,

where Virgil's almost most emotional intervention in the poem is when he steps in to lament the death of the two friends in book nine of the Ediad, Nisus and Eurylius. These two beautiful young men who've gone on, off to fight the Routulians, the enemy of Aeneas's men in this sort of audacious knight-sorty, and they've been separated, and one of them is being killed, and the other who's reached safety turns back to rescue him, and they're both killed. And Virgil steps in after this kind of extraordinary description of the death of these beautiful young men

and says if my poem did nothing else, it should preserve all time the memory of these two friends. You use the word beautiful young men. Listeners will feel that there's necessarily a homoerotic element in this. Do you think there is? Well, it's not just listeners who will wonder because people wondered at the time. And we're talking about this.

Well, yes, but I mean, I think it's interesting that in the case of Achilles and Petroclos, for instance, the question of whether that friendship was a sexual one, was one debated by the ancient Greeks themselves. It crops up in the symposium, in Plato's symposium, for instance. And it's debated in many places. And with Virgil, the debate amongst academics and scholars nowadays has been made more intense by the fact that the poem is notable

for the way in which it privileges intense bonds between male friends over bonds between men and women. The women are all got rid of. Aeneas leaves Troy, he loses his wife. They're destructive or they simply get in the world. Yeah, and when they've got to go and a man's got to do things. And when they're going off to found Rome, they stop on Sicily. And the women all want to stay.

The women are sick of this sort of endless voyaging. And they actually start burning the ships in order that Aeneas and his men can't go any further. And Aeneas says, right, okay, well, we're going to leave the women behind. But it's more interesting than that evening in my view, that is that when he really falls in love with Dido, and then he leaves her. Of course, yes. Because his destiny, and he leaves her for...

She isn't strong enough a friend. She isn't in the category of friends that you've been talking about, is she? No, that's right. And women have to be left, and women actually, in the story, in the poem, go a bit mad. I mean, some of the most extraordinary bits of the poem are... I mean, Dido's speech, which is wonderful, impassioned, operatic stuff. But the sense is that erotic bonds between men and women are impossible and slightly kind of hysterical.

And of course, the poem ends in a way which I think is not often sort of remarked upon in an extraordinary way, where right at the end, Eeneas is poised over the prone but still living body of his enemy, Ternus, who's disarmed. And Eeneas has his sword ready to strike, and Ternus begs for his life. Now, in any Hollywood movie, the virtuous man would let his enemy off. But just at the moment where he's thinking of doing it, Ania sees on Ternus's body the belts, the buckler, which Ternus has stolen from a beautiful young man, Pallas, he's killed in an earlier battle. And at that moment, Aeneas, furious, strikes his sword through Ternus's prone and defenseless body. So again, kind of the claim of a bond between one man and another, produces this kind of angry, righteous violence.

To fast forward three or four centuries, Mark, after that aria from our friend, Professor Mullen. Angie wants to say something. Well, yes, because there is... And I can tell, by the way, you're waving your mind and miming. It gave you a clue. Because, well, there is, there's an alternative tradition in the classical world,

which I really think we should mention, because it brings women into the picture, and that's the tradition of Epicurus. If I can just very briefly say, because Epicurus is iconoclastic in so many ways to start with. He goes against Aristotle's notion that friendship is the bond of the state. And he thinks that the polis is in fact entirely destructive to friendship. So he sets up his kind of philosophical commune outside the city walls of Athens

in a place that he calls the garden, though it's not clear whether gardening actually goes on, but there would have been flowers and trees. And here, though he sets up this commune in opposition to the police, he doesn't set it up in opposition to the family. Members are allowed to bring spouses and children. And what's really unusual is that women are allowed in in their own right. They don't have to come as a wife or a mother. They can be there in their own right.

We know this from letters. There was, in fact, a famous member of the school called Leontyon, who was a former prostitute. So we have to bear in mind that there is more than one story in the ancient world. It's not just male-on-male friendship. We have Epicurus, and his ideal of the philosophic life of friendship is providing the best means to Atraxia to tranquility, and in that we can have male and female friendships too and children.

Can we move to the Christian world now, then, to Augustine, a few centuries later after Cicero and Seneca, and how his view on friendship entered into the Christian view on friendship. Augustine completely turns around the philosophical discussion of friendship, I think. In his early youth, he had a very close friend, and it's before he was a Christian, and he sees this friendship very much in classical terms. However, tragedy struck and this friend died,

and what's even worse is during the friend's illness, the two had a huge row and so died at enmity. And this completely destroys Augustine, in fact. He writes about it very movingly in his confessions. And he has what we would call a nervous breakdown. It takes him years to recover, which he does as he becomes a Christian. And he decides that he was a fool to love this man, this friend, as if he were a God. And what you get in Augustine's thought is a kind of triangulation.

that friendship is only good and substantial and trustworthy when it's triangulated within the love of God. So you love your friend through God. Exactly, yes. And sort of theoretically, this then becomes a great motif in Christian thought, which is that God's love is universal and selfless, whereas friendship is particular and selfish. And this cast a shadow right across the Christian tradition to this day, I think. How does that fit in with one of the best-known remark quotations from friendship?

to love had no man than delayed on his life for his friend from St. John. How does that square with what you've said? Well, I think that John represents an alternative tradition, always alternative traditions, of course. What he meant, I think, is not so much how we interpret that expression today. There's evidence that Friends was actually a word that the early Christians used to denote each other when they were having to stay in hiding in ancient Rome and elsewhere.

And what that is saying is that to be called to be a Christian, is to be called to, prepared to lose your life. And this places a very sort of high premium upon that kind of friendship. Do you see it that way, Angie? Yes, I think that's right. And of course, I don't know if we're going to go on to Aquinas, because he's going to... And we can go into Aquinas right now, too. Well, he flies the flag for human friendships and love of God being compatible.

What Aquinas is trying to do is reconcile his Christianity with his... love of Aristotle and part of that project is going to be to reconcile human friendships with our charity love of God. How does he do that? Because they seem to be quite a long way apart, aren't they really? We need in rush now. Let's just stay there.

How does Augusta, how does Aquinas take Augustine and Aristotle? We've talked about this quite often over the series. But in this particular business of friendship, it would seem to me that they're a long way apart. How does he find some reconciliation? Well, I personally I personally don't think he does quite bring it off. I'll be interested to see what Mark and John have to say.

He starts off by saying that human friendships have intrinsic value. You love your friend for your friend's own sake. However, what he seems to do is model our charity love, our agape love of God, on the model of a human friendship. So he says that you love God as a friend. I think I'm right in saying that God is friendship. Now the problem with that to me, and sorry, and then you, use your love of God the friend as a means to become more like God, the notion of the imitation of Christ. Now, the problem with this to me, we're back to the old difficulty of self-sufficiency, because if God is perfect and perfect goodness, then does God need friends?

In what sense, is God a friend to us? So to my mind, there are still questions with Aquinas' position, and I'd be interested to know what my colleagues think. Another thinker who does something similar is El Red of Revo, not nearly so important to theologian as Aquinas, but increasingly read today, in fact. And there's a story with Al Red too. He contrasts worldly friendship,

which he sees as quite Machiavellian, doesn't use that word, of course, but it's the kind of how to win friends and influence people. And he contrasts that with spiritual friendship and writes the book, which we can still read today, spiritual friendship, a friendship based on love and goodness and solely what you can give to the other.

He also had a very close friend, Simon. He was a monk and there were both monks and Simon dies. But Elred's experience of Simon's death is completely different from Augustine's. Elred says that because the friend lives on in me after the death and he uses Cicero in that,

therefore friendship gives me a glimpse of heaven. It kind of opens the curtains of eternity. And he therefore supposes that in Eden it was friendship that counted, and in heaven where we're all going as Christians, friendship will be the love that lasts as well. How is this when we, just after this, not long after, in terms of the way we race through this programme,

I mean, sort of a mini-second after Aquinas, the humanist idea of friendship comes to play a very big part in private and in creative politics, if I can, it's a rubbishy phrase, but still, you know what I'm talking about in the 15th and 16th century, And they go back to the Greeks, as it were, it seems to me they sort of, they leap over Aquinas and, you know, Augustine, and they say, no, no, no, we want to go back there. Can you develop that? Yes, well, I mean, I think friendship is sort of rediscovered in quite a practical way in some ways as a kind of fundamental value by the humanists of the Renaissance. I mean, this is in countries in societies where the court is the center of both power and culture, circles of friendship, I think, become a,

a kind of escape, an escape from the world of Machiavellianism, the world where whatever somebody says, you can't actually trust them because you have a power relationship with them. And there's a very famous, a very important example of this in European culture, in English culture, which is the friendship of the two, arguably the two most important humanist writers of the early 16th century, Thomas More, and Erasmus, who are great friends,

But whose writings, whose most important writings, are themselves consequences of friendship, or rather their friendship sort of inscribed into them. So, for instance, Erasmus is famous in praise of folly, which is actually called Mori-I encomium. It's a pun. It's a joke. A praise of Moore. And it's written in Moore's house at Moore's suggestion. But more than this, it's actually addressed to him.

If you read the text now, it's talking to Thomas Moore. And Moore's Utopia, rather than more complicated, not addressed to Erasmus, but it's addressed to a man called Peter Giles, who's a mutual friend whom Moore meets in Antwerp, and with whom he has conversations. And the conversations become the first part of utopia. But how is friendship important, as it were, in the thought and lives and activities,

of these scholars? And is it just with scholars? Or does it reach over into other parts of society? Well, friendship is important as a kind of bond of candor and shared intellectual interests in a kind of world where the conditions, the relationships

of patronage between people, which Erasmus in the church and more as a court as Lord Chancellor of England knew very well, make impossible. Yeah, I think also it's important to remember the religious milieu and that that provides its opportunities to people to make vows to each other. And in fact, recent historical work is showing an institution of friendship

that existed through the medieval into the Renaissance period, which is often called sworn friendship now, where people saw they could, two men in particular, and it was complementary to marriage, could make a vow of friendship to each other that was mirrored on an understanding of God's love, but it carried social weight as well. It wasn't just a private institution.

There are accounts of these sworn friendships affecting social change and healing old eminities and so on within churches. But in their writings, I mean, it made for both Erasmus and more the publication of really kind of quite audacious speculations, but within the kernel of a kind of private exchange of ideas, things which they couldn't have, as it were, said in their public person. but they were able to say to each other. So in praise of folly is a kind of withering satire on the abuses within the church.

And utopia speculates in all sorts of really fundamental ways about the way a state should be run. And it speculates it does that in the England of Henry VIII, which otherwise would be a kind of quite a risky thing to do. And friendship is literally, but also in a literary way, what allows that to happen. Yes, I mean, but as well as furthering, scholarship in the way that more an Erasmus do and Montaigne and La Boeiti. There's also a strand at this period of regarding friendship

in a very practical way, almost in a handbook way. I mean, Bacon's essay on friendship gives us, he lists of what he calls the uses of friendship because he says you're going to live in a wilderness without friends. You need friends for your emotional well-being to unburden your soul and pour everything out and cleanse your mind and spirit. You need friends to talk problems through with,

to clarify your thoughts and to receive their good advice and counsel. And as John was saying, to cut you down to size if you're getting too puffed up, he says friendship is the best remedy against flattery. And also back to an idea that we started with with the Greeks in an era where there was very little in the way of social welfare. You absolutely need your friends to help you out in times of poverty or looking after your children or to complete your works after you've died, which is where he ends.

He says, if you die too soon, your friends will complete your projects for you. So they were asking more of friends in the sense than we do today. There's an extraordinary powerful, I think, imaginative representation of what friendship might be like in a courtly society in Shakespeare's Hamlet, actually. Am I allowed to talk about as veer off to Shakespeare? We're quite near Shakespeare. I've had to skip a question, but I'll skip a question. We've got far too many questions this morning.

Hamlet has within it, I think, one of the most brilliant. brilliant, although partial depictions of a friendship in literature, Hamlet and Horatio. And the whole point about it is, of course, Hamlets are playing about a court in which everybody, except Horatio, whom Hamlet meets, is one of the chessmen or chess women in this court, and everybody is after something and up to something. And Horatio, who is Hamlet's fellow student,

It's the first work I know. I'm sure there are earlier ones which kind of glorifies the kind of bride's head relationship of two students as being the ultimate sort of bond between two young men, who comes from Bittenberg and is untainted by the court. And love for Hamlet is impossible. Duty is impossible. Everything is impossible except this friendship with Horatio. and Hamlet, in fact, relies, the whole play relies on Horatio being there for Hamlet to be able to speak, to discourse, to investigate in his mind, his situation. And this is kind of represented as being the most, in some ways, the most valuable and the only sincere relationship in the whole play. But it's interesting, more than interesting. When we look at Shakespeare, great friendships in Shepard. Shakespeare are also the nests and the cradles of massive corruption and betrayal, the Othello Yaga, the Macbeth Banco. So friendship, do you want to take that up, Mark?

Yeah, I mean, one of Shakespeare's memorable aphorisms on friendship is most friendship is feigning. He also adds, most loving its folly, but nonetheless, that's still pretty negative on friendship. Another name to throw into the ring here is Montaigne, who wrote a great essay on friendship. He makes a startling claim in that essay, though. He says that his friendship with Etienne liberty, is the best, is a friendship of that quality, which is based on goodness and not these Machiavellian needs and so on, is only like to happen once every three centuries.

That's his estimate. Now, he's prejudiced, obviously, but it does sort of highlight how there was an awful lot of scheming going on with friendship. Yeah, but can we keep to this idea of friendship being capable of the darkest sign, of friendship being able to breed, in a sense, only through the intense friendship?

and it could be Aristotelian the best sort of friendship between people who seem to totally give each other everything can the worst come out. You know, Iago seems to love Athelou will do rely on Yaga and out of that comes down forever. Well, I mean, to go back to Plato's Lysos where we started, Socrates makes this very perceptive point. The more similar people are, yes, we say they're going to have a lot in common,

they're more likely to be friends, but of course there's more scope for rivalry, for contention. for the darker site to come out. So you see Yago and Othello is similar in terms of the military. But they've gone through some similar experiences. Yes, of course they're not similar in status. But the status thing's important, isn't it? Yes.

I mean, this is a crass generalisation, but in Shakespeare's fascinated by friendship. And basically, the two things which threaten friendship are, or which corrupt or corrupt friendship are power and sex. and essentially the tragedies are about how power infiltrates and corrupts and mischapes friendship. And the comedies are about can friendship cope with sex? The very first play, Gentleman of Rona. Yes.

That is sex corrupts that great friendship. Well, not corrupt. Well, because the comedy saved the friendships. You know, that's why they have a happy ending. It threatens the friendships, though. It does. It does. But is this just the male friendships in Shakespeare?

Because we get some very strong female friendships. As you like it, is all about, you know, what are women friends like when one of them falls in love with somebody else. But we've also got The Merchant of Venice and Portia and Noriss and so I'm really helping each other out. Yeah, and it's a very profound play about friendship and about, of course, another question about friendship, which is, can friendship survive or know itself to be sincere when money is involved? Because that's, of course, you know, that place starts with two friends, one of whom, gives the other lots of money. And it's a kind of, and I take it that in a way,

the merchant of Venice, is about how we would be wrong to think friendship can somehow exist pure, abstracted, from any actual bonds. But on the contrary, that it can include, you know, gifts, relationships of gift giving between two people. Mark Vernon, it can't bring a new view of friendship to bear on this. In some ways, I guess you can see,

Kant as formalizing these problems, he didn't write much about friendship. And in fact, this is a slightly characteristic of modern philosophers. But he did give a lecture on friendship. And he finds it very problematic. Kant's very interested in ethics that can be universalized, that can be applied undifferentiatedly right across the population. His categorical imperative is the famous example of that. And friendship poses a huge problem for him in this way,

because friends don't act according to rules, and they act according to their love and their experience together and so on. And so he, in a way, pushes friendship to one side in modern ethics. He actually says he doesn't think there'll be friendship in heaven because heaven will be the place where morality is perfectly lived out, and there isn't really a place for friendship in modern morality. When the...

Can we move across now back to the literary, which we obviously dwelt a little bit on Shakespeare, but in the idea of friendship, in the 18th century in literary circles, John Mullen, became quite a prevailing and important idea. I would say it became, in the 18th century, friendship became a kind of secular religion, actually. And, I mean, thinking about Kant, you know,

the 18th century is the great kind of period of clubs and societies, and in the great city of clubs and societies, Enlightenment Edinburgh, philosophers like David Hume and Adam Smith, they actually valued their culture as, I think they thought, the first true culture of friendship, actually, because what they believed was that actually it was only in a commercial society, a market economy, that you could really value friendship. Because before, for the whole of human history, friendship had been tangled up

in other kinds of commitment and bond and obligation. And now you could leave the market to get on with that. and meanwhile, off to the side, you can enjoy these friendships. And the great literary figures of the 18th century styled themselves by their friendships, and Pope and Swift, Johnson and Boswell. This is a century famous for friendships, which weren't just matters biography,

but were recorded and memorialised in what these people wrote to each other and wrote about each other. Angie? What intrigues me, I'd be interested to know Johnson Mark's opinion, is in the 18th century we've got, as John said, privately this culture of friendship and the coffee houses and so on. But in terms of the philosophy, we've got Kant, we've also got the first founder of utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham, in their different ways, giving us philosophies which are universal, impartial and at face value, initially might seem to raise a question about whether there's space in friendship,

either in Kantian deontology based on notion of duties and obeying the categorical imperative in human rights or in Benthamite utilitarianism based on the greatest good of the greatest number. So it seems to me that we've now got rather a split between what the philosophers are doing, saying morality, virtue is based on this impartial, universal perspective where we're looking at,

acts rather than agents, that we're not so concerned with the flourishing life as our starting point. And then we've got these great literary figures almost retreating from that into these, would you say rather too cozy a word? Mark, I'm going back to John. It's interesting John mentioned Adam Smith, because although friendship was very important to a personal level for these thinkers and writers, Adam Smith, in his theory of moral sentiments,

one of the ways you can read that book is there's a struggle to try and give friendship and moral sensibilities between people, a public platform as well as a private place. And the trouble that Adam Smith has is that in a modern commercial society, the most important value is not happiness, it's not virtue like the Greek's thought. It's pure cooperation. As long as people cooperate and obey the law,

then that society can function. And so friendship doesn't really rise to the fore as a great virtual value in modern society because it's not really needed. I mean, Angie described friendship as a kind of retreat, which I suppose I think is the wrong metaphor, because the striking thing about these writers of the 18th century that I've mentioned is not just that they enjoyed their friendships,

but that the literature which now we read and value and which was read and valued at the time, as it were, enacted those friendships. I mean, the dominant literary form of the 18th century, arguably, is the letter. And it's amazing, I mean, real letters, which they wrote in order to be collected and kept. And they had friendships through letters. They had friendships through that. You'd never meet people and never be his best friend.

And then he wrote hundreds of wonderful kind of intimate catty letters to him. Pope and Swift were separated for decades on end and wrote these wonderful letters to each other. But also, the letter became a kind of way in which you wrote poetry or fiction. Pope's greatest poems are all epistles written to somebody. And reviving a classical thing, of course, because this is what Horace did, that, as it were, the most familiar and free-thinking way of writing was to write to a friend.

And Johnson and Boswell, of course, became their relationship, became a literary work, but also the novels of the 18th century, many of the great novels. are written in fictional letters, recording the consciousness of their characters through the writing of letters to friends, as if that's the best way of catching a person's personality? Yes, no, I didn't mean that they were retreating from life.

I meant they appeared to be retreating from the dominant philosophers of the time. And I think what's interesting is that the philosophers fight back and try to reinstate friendship into these apparently universal and impartial philosophers. For instance, later utilitarians such as Mill and his own. followers say no, there's actually plenty of space in utilitarianism. For friendship, you're actually much more likely to increase human happiness and human utility if you concentrate on the well-being of your friend because you understand them best. So there is this dialogue going on, but I am interested in the tensions there that we see arising. Is friendship still a subject

of philosophical inquiry, Mark Marno? It's increasingly so. Nietzsche, who wrote a lot on friendship in his middle period. He said, not since the Greeks has friendship been thought a problem worthy of a solution. It's quite interesting the way he phrases that. But this tension, between public and private, I think, in particular, in modern society, in a society today, we value friendship, perhaps more than anything else for our happiness at a private level. But yet the minute it pokes its heads above the private into the public,

it becomes suspicious. We talk of nepotism. We talk of compromising meritocracy. And it seems to challenge some of our most basic values to do with rights. and to do with equality and so on. Thank you all very much. I'm sorry we've come to the end of this, but we have. That's the way it goes.

Thanks to Angie Holmes, Mark Vernon and John Mullen. Next week we will be looking at the history of negative numbers, discovered by the Chinese, dismissed by the Greeks, and finally accepted by the Bankers of Renaissance Europe. Thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.uk

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